


Wild Game

by pallidiflora



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Hunting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-08
Updated: 2014-08-08
Packaged: 2018-02-12 07:20:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2100585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallidiflora/pseuds/pallidiflora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Washing beardless youths in blood was a nearly universal conceit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wild Game

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a larger work that I'll probably never finish, so have this snippet!

When they were older—teenagers, by Midgardian reckoning, but still yet boys—their father had tasked Thor with the slaying of a bear. All boys who wished to become men did it; washing beardless youths in blood was a nearly universal conceit. Loki and his father had watched from a tower as Thor’s hunting party set off for Alfheim, a procession of gleaming helmets. Midsummer, and he had been girded to the neck, oblivious to the heat, slapping backs, puffing out his chest; like a child playacting in his father’s armour, swinging a wooden sword. Loki had found the day oppressive, the air close and syrupy, and had spent most of it languishing under a tree, feeling wilted. _Sulking_ , his father would say; his mother, with her genteel word choices, would say _resting_. Though resting for what purpose? There always was one, inevitably.  
  
“And what of me?” he had said as they watched Thor’s procession disappear into Heimdall’s observatory.  
  
“What _of_ you?” His father was fond of feigning ignorance in this way: serenely, dismissively.  
  
“What beast would you have me slay?”  
  
“Your impertinence will be your undoing someday,” Odin said, and had turned away, footsteps heavy, a calculated, authoritative one-two one-two. A walk Thor had yet to master. “Your time will come.”  
  
Loki had stayed awhile longer, watching as the observatory spun and finally slowed to a stop. His upper lip was perspiring, and tasted of sugar.

* * *

They returned the next evening, jubilant, the dead bear trussed up between two horses. An hour later Loki had descended from his rooms to find a small crowd gathered in one of the courtyards; the bear was hung upside-down from a tree, as their father once had been. Odin told them the tale enough times, impassive, factual—how he gazed beyond death and fell back screaming. He would not have looked so ignoble, hanging from the branches of Yggdrasill.  
  
The crowd watched as Thor slit it open, slicking the cobblestones with congealed blood; he split its ribs, left the entrails to slither free and finally skinned it, revealing its naked, diminished twin, smooth and yellow-pink with fat. Someone else would clean the pelt and cut the meat, which would then be eaten, as was right; Thor would take his trophies from it afterward: its head, its fur, perhaps a few bones.  
  
“How barbaric,” Loki said, without feeling. “And what do you plan on doing with these spoils of yours?”  
  
“Whatever I wish,” Thor said. He was well in his cups by then, and smelled of mead, polish, raw meat.  



End file.
